Female Gladiators (Sport and Society) by Fields Sarah K

Author:Fields, Sarah K.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2010-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

6 Wrestling

Wrestling, one of the world’s oldest sports, is built on strength and enhanced fighting skills. The ancient Greeks wrestled in their Olympic games, and the sport has survived in various forms ever since. In general the sport in the United States does not have the numbers (excluding professional wrestling), either in terms of participation or revenue production, of football, baseball, or basketball, although in some regions it is exceedingly popular.1 For example, midwestern members of the Big Ten and Big Twelve collegiate conferences have long been wrestling powerhouses, and wrestling in those states has been and remains a successful sport, drawing large audiences and recruiting young participants. The captains of wrestling teams in small midwestern towns are often the social equals of the captains of football teams.

Wrestling is, even more than football, an intensely physical sport, and those who participate are lauded for their strength and quickness. Perhaps as a result of that physicality and the sport’s origins as training for warriors, wrestling has been predominantly male throughout its history. As with baseball, football, and basketball, however, girls ultimately asked for the opportunity to try out for school wrestling teams, and, as was the case in those other sports, some communities refused to give them that opportunity. The girls sued, trying to rely on Title IX and the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and yet even when the courts opened the mats to girls, cultural opposition remained strong.2

A Social and Legal History of Female Wrestling

Despite the sport’s physicality and warrior-training origins, historians have established that a few women and girls wrestled, at least sporadically, from almost the beginning of the sport. Spartan leaders, for example, encouraged girls and young women to wrestle and otherwise participate in physical activities. Why Spartan females were so active has remained a matter of debate. Some scholars have suggested that the Spartan goal was to encourage strong females who would bear strong sons, but others have suggested that their athleticism represented the greater freedom Spartan women enjoyed compared to their Greek counterparts.3 In addition, several different African tribes allowed young girls to wrestle. In some the girls wrestled against each other as part of initiation into womanhood. Among the Diola of Gambia, for example, girls and boys wrestled among their own gender, and the champions married. In still other tribes, reportedly, boys and girls wrestled against each other for sport.4

In Western civilizations, accounts of commercialized and professionalized females wrestling date to the eighteenth century in Europe and the United States. In the second half of the eighteenth century Margaret Evans from North Wales allegedly wrestled into her seventies, even against men much younger than she.5 Some women in England wrestled in barns, with the winner taking a plateful of coins collected from the spectators; French women wrestled at fairs. In 1893 in America the Police Gazette sponsored a women’s championship round for which combatants dressed in tights and, to prevent hair pulling, cut their hair short.6 Thus the history of female wrestling predates

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